Broken
by Xenexian
Summary: Oneshot. Ashton remembers the night that Lindsey was Bitten... Zombie Apocalypse AR R&R


**A/N:**** These are some thoughts I had while writing a post on a zombie apocalypse forum I'm on. My character, Ashton, is living in a city in a bomb shelter with around 40 other survivors. On the other side of the city are 15 people who are living in a university hideout. Together, these 55 people must survive through 2021 and a zombie apocalypse. There's this thread abut Ashton visiting the grave of her best friend and remembering what happened. The part that I put as my post on the forum is in **_**italics**_**. Have fun reading the gore oh, and btw, if anyone wants the link to the site, just PM me **

**Disclaimer:**** I own my characters. My good friend Laurie owns the forum that this post is from and she also owns the overall plot. Any similarities to any other works of fiction are purely coincidental.**

**Broken**

_Ashton Douglas kneeled down on the smooth concrete floor, gazing at the small uneven grave in front of her. She brushed the dust and small amount of loose rubble from the surface and read the small badly engraved words in the face of the gravestone: _

_**Lindsey Grant, 30th May 1999 - 19th June 2019 May God have the same trust in you that I had.**___

_She brushed away a tear and rested her hand upon the name. Her best friend, practically her sister, lay underneath there. She remembered back to 19th June 2019, painfully. They had been running for their lives from the zombies, chased from their own streets by the terrorised residents there to lure the zombies from their houses, to protect themselves. They had used Ashton and Lindsey as live bait._

_They hadn't been fast enough. Or at least Lindsey hadn't. A zombie had managed to bite her just as they crossed the threshold of the Hideout. Matt was behind them, cutting the zombies back, but there was nothing that could have been done for Lindsey. She had signed her own death warrant the second she had flung her arm out for the door._

_They had kept her in the quarantine for three days while the saliva the zombie had injected into her bloodstream slowly changed her into a zombie. V.I.R.U.S had turned up too late to do their tests on her while she was in transition, and Annabel Toritz had shot Lindsey in the head seconds after she had Awoken._

_They all knew how it felt to loose someone to the Dead. There were over 100 bodies buried here; 87% of those had Awoken when they were killed. Again._

_Sighing, Ashton smiled a teary smile at her dead friend. "Why'd you have to go and die on me, huh, Linds?"_

Ashton remembered the day that Lindsey had died. She remembered it vividly, even though sometimes... most of the time... she wished that she didn't. Every time she went out of the doors and into the zombie apocalypse that lay outside the walls of the underground bomb shelter that was called the Hideout, she remembered what happened the last time Lindsey had been with her. It was all her fault that her best friend had died. It was her fault, even though she hadn't done anything.

It was the night of the 19th June 2019. Ashton and Lindsey were trying to sneak out of the library they were holed up in without alerting the zombies to the face that there were actual real breathing humans around. Lindsey got out first and held out a hand that Ashton took. She was pulled out into the night and they turned to run towards the black sedan that was their escape. Except as soon as they turned the corner, they saw pretty quickly that they couldn't get to the sedan. Why?

Because there were zombies _everywhere_. Rotting corpses, reanimated through some weird drug that had been tested once upon a time last year, were crawling over the sleek shiny black roof, breaking windows in an effort to try and get to the humans that weren't inside the car. Hundreds of the walking dead were descending on the car, fast. _'They're new,_ ' Ashton thought in horror. _'These are freshly made zombies!'_ Her second thought was how the Hell they were going to get out of there now.

There was nothing to do, Ashton supposed. All they could do was run, and everyone knew that running from zombies is probably the worst thing to do. Yeah, they might seem like dumb dead things, but when they were hunting in a pack, they were like wolves, like wild animals. Their techniques became effective and they could easily outrun a human if there was a pack of them. And there were more than a pack of them on the sedan. It was more like a zombie pack cubed.

But what other choice did they have? They turned and ran as fast as they could away from the car that had gotten them to the city in the first place. The city centre came into view as they rounded a crumbling building. There were shuffling zombies everywhere here, too, though they hadn't seemed to have noticed them yet. Small comfort. Lindsey and Ashton slowed down, not knowing where to go now. It seemed that there were zombies everywhere, on all sides, and this wasn't a good thing. In fact, this was about as bad as it got. Just as they resolved to get going again, a hand grabbed Ashton around the neck and jerked her backwards.

The hand was rotting away, literally, with fingers hanging at crooked angles, blackened nails digging into Ashton's skin with a sickening liquid noise. The stench from the flesh was like rotting meat. Ashton knew that she was going to die. This undead creature was either going to eat her while she was still conscious or bite her and turn her into something like itself. Either way, death was a certainty.

But she wasn't counting on somebody else saving her. A large hand reached out and grabbed her, puling her upright and beating the zombie out of the way simultaneously. She felt herself being thrown back towards Lindsey and a distinctly male, _alive_, voice told her to run.

Run they did. Ashton took off first, closely followed by Lindsey and then the guy who had saved them. They streaked past hundreds of zombies who turned and groaned at them as they past. Ashton was sure that they had a following pack, but she didn't dare look back to check. They ran so hard and so fast that they got to a bomb shelter before the rest of the zombies had truly realised what was happening. Ashton squeezed through the door and into a large metal cage first, followed by Lindsey.

But that was the problem. Lindsey appeared to be caught on the door, because the blonde was swinging it shut, but she wasn't walking into the cage. Then she pulled her arm into Ash's view.

Ashton screamed.

Attached to her friend's arm was the mouth and head of a zombie. Its teeth were sunken into Lindsey's flesh. Then the guy was there, beating the zombie over the head with a metal bar. The zombie disappeared with a splattering of blood and then there was... Silence. The guy, dark haired with light sliver eyes, Ashton could now see, slammed the door behind them. As they watched, Lindsey's eyes began to film over, turning opaque, and her speech slurred, her movements sluggish. Another dark haired woman dragged Lindsey out of the cage towards a neon orange-painted door labelled 'DO NOT ENTER'.

Lindsey... Lindsey was dead.


End file.
